The River’s Secret

“Clivilius doesn’t just show you wonders—it asks what you’re willing to feel when you let go of everything you thought you knew.”

The sun hung in the sky, a burning disc so bright it seemed to flatten everything beneath it into submission. The light poured down without restraint, gilding the dunes in shades of molten gold, catching every crest and hollow until the landscape glowed with an intensity that made me squint despite myself.

Above it all stretched the sky—blue, impossibly blue, the kind of saturated colour that postcards tried to capture and never quite managed. No clouds interrupted its expanse. No contrails scarred its surface. Just that endless vault arching overhead, so vast and so clean that looking at it made me feel simultaneously tiny and strangely untethered, as though gravity might decide at any moment to stop being relevant and let me drift upward into all that empty space.

I stood alone in the centre of it all, a single vertical interruption in the horizontal sweep of sand and sky. The dunes rolled away from me in every direction, orange and ochre waves frozen mid-swell, their surfaces rippled by winds I couldn't feel but could see evidence of in the patterns etched across them. The scale of it resisted comprehension—my brain kept trying to impose familiar references, to convince me I was looking at a beach at low tide or a construction site piled with coloured sand, anything to make the enormity manageable.

But there was nothing familiar here. Nothing to anchor the eye or comfort the mind. Just sand and sun and silence, stretching to horizons that seemed further away than horizons had any right to be.

The quiet pressed against me from all sides, so complete it almost had texture. Back home, even in the most peaceful moments, there was always something—the hum of the refrigerator, the distant rumble of traffic, the white noise of civilisation that you stopped noticing until it was gone. Here, there was nothing. The silence wasn't just an absence of sound; it was a presence, filling the space where noise should have been with something that made my ears strain for input they couldn't find.

I became aware of my own breathing, the soft rasp of air moving in and out of my lungs, the subtle thump of my heartbeat. Sounds I never heard at home, drowned out by everything else. Here, they seemed almost loud.

I drew in a long, deliberate breath, letting my lungs fill completely, tasting the air of Clivilius for the first time since stepping through the portal.

The difference was immediate and startling.

It was clean. Not just fresh-air clean, not just countryside-away-from-the-city clean, but something deeper than that. Something that reminded me of childhood—those rare trips into the Outback when I was young, before the family had fractured and holidays became complicated negotiations. Even then, I realised now, there had always been traces of something wrong in the air. The faint bitter edge of exhaust from the highway we'd just left. The chemical tang of sunscreen evaporating from my skin. The subtle wrongness that hung over everything back home, so constant and so pervasive that I'd stopped noticing it the way fish probably stopped noticing water.

Here, there was none of that. The air tasted the way air was supposed to taste—crisp and light and almost sweet, carrying nothing but its own existence. Each breath felt like it was doing something, actually nourishing me in a way that breathing back home had forgotten how to do. I found myself taking another breath, then another, greedy for it suddenly, as though my lungs had been waiting thirty-four years for air that didn't come pre-poisoned.

The contrast hit me harder than I'd expected. Standing here, breathing this, I could feel the accumulated weight of everything I'd left behind—not just the physical pollution but all of it. The noise and the stress and the constant low-grade anxiety of existing in a world that seemed determined to make existence difficult. The sense that I was running on fumes, burning through reserves I didn't have to meet demands I couldn't refuse.

None of that reached me here. The silence was too complete, the distance too vast. Whatever was happening back in Hobart—Jamie driving toward the airport, Paul's plane descending through clouds, the whole complicated machinery of my life grinding forward without me—it felt like something happening to someone else. A story I'd read once and mostly forgotten.

And in that strange, suspended moment, I felt something shift inside me. Not an answer—nothing that clear or complete—but the beginning of a question I hadn't known I needed to ask. What if this wasn't just escape? What if it was something else entirely?

The thought settled into me like sediment drifting to the bottom of still water.

Clivilius, in all its stark and empty beauty, wasn't offering me paradise. It was too harsh for that, too uncompromising in its vastness. But it was offering something. A blank page. A chance to write something new instead of endlessly editing a manuscript that had grown cluttered with other people's notes and corrections.

A do-over—not naïve, not blind to everything that had come before, but informed by it. Tempered by the hard lessons I'd already learned.

The weight of that possibility pressed down on me even as it lifted me up. Here was potential so vast it was almost terrifying. And with it came responsibility: don't waste this. Don't repeat the old mistakes. Don't let whatever comes next become as cluttered and compromised as everything that came before.

A few paces ahead, barely visible against the orange sand, the book lay where I had left it. The sight of it—that ordinary object, that relic of my ordinary life, lying in this extraordinary place—sent something complicated through my chest.

I crossed the distance slowly, each step pressing firm marks into the sand. The grains shifted and whispered beneath my feet, a soft hissing that was the first sound beyond my own body that I'd heard since arriving. It seemed to amplify the solitude rather than breaking it—a reminder that I was the only moving thing in this entire visible world.

Crouching beside the book, I lifted it carefully from its resting place. Orange dust clung to the cover in a thin film, coating the title, filling the grooves of the embossed lettering. I brushed it away with my thumb, watching the familiar words emerge from beneath the layer of alien soil, and the gesture felt strangely ceremonial. As though I wasn't just cleaning a book but completing some kind of ritual—accepting something, agreeing to something, crossing a line I wouldn't be able to uncross.

The last traces of my doubt fell away with the dust.

It was one thing to step through a portal in the dead of night, disoriented and half-convinced you were dreaming. It was another to stand in full daylight, clear-headed and wide awake, and hold physical evidence that you'd been here before. The book was real. The dust coating it was real. The impossible was real, and I was holding proof of it in my hands.

I turned the book over slowly, fingers tracing the familiar ridges and grooves of the cover, eyes drinking in every detail as though I might find something different, something changed by its journey between worlds. But it was exactly as it had always been—the same weight, the same texture, the same slight warping at the corner where I'd once left it too close to a cup of coffee. The pages riffled in the faint breeze, their edges catching the light, each one a silent witness to the impossible path this object had travelled.

I tugged gently at the spine, testing its integrity, half-expecting to find some alteration, some sign that crossing dimensions left a mark. But no—the binding held firm, the glue undamaged, the book itself unchanged by everything it had been through.

Only I had changed. Only I was different.

"It's real," I whispered, and the words disappeared into the dry air almost before they'd finished leaving my lips.

The declaration wasn't meant for anyone but myself. I needed to hear it, needed to speak acceptance out loud so the part of me that was still looking for rational explanations would finally give up and pay attention. The truth of it settled into my chest like a key sliding home, and suddenly I wasn't just standing in a desert anymore. I was standing in the first moment of something—a beginning so new I couldn't see its shape yet, couldn't guess at what it might become.

I pressed it against my chest and let myself breathe.

The untouched emptiness around me seemed to exhale in agreement, vast and patient and full of unwritten futures. And in my hands, the book weighed more than paper and ink could ever weigh. It was an anchor and a key and a bridge, all at once. A reminder that every step I took here would change me, just as surely as I had already begun to change Clivilius simply by believing in it.

A light breeze stirred across the dunes, its cool fingers brushing my bare shoulders, raising goosebumps on skin that had already begun to warm under the relentless sun. Around my feet, sand grains lifted and swirled in brief spirals, dancing for a moment before settling back to earth. The movement gave the stillness a pulse, transformed the silence into something breathing.

I closed my eyes and let the moment seep into me.

The calm was unlike anything I'd experienced in years—maybe ever. It smoothed the jagged edges of my thoughts, quieted the gnawing restlessness that had become such a constant companion I'd forgotten it wasn't supposed to be there. The fractures in my relationship with Jamie, the complicated machinery of getting Paul here under false pretences, the thousand small anxieties that had been piling up like unpaid bills—all of it felt distant suddenly, stripped of its urgency by the sheer scale of where I was standing.

The world was holding me. That's what it felt like. Not in a mystical way, not with any conscious intent, but in the simple physical fact of ground beneath my feet and air in my lungs and warmth on my skin. I existed here, in this moment, and for once that felt like enough.

Then the silence shifted.

At first, I thought I'd imagined it—a vibration at the very edge of perception, so faint it might have been nothing more than my ears adjusting to the quiet. A low hum, barely there, threading through the stillness like a single note held beneath the threshold of hearing.

I tilted my head, straining to locate it.

The sound persisted, grew, resolved from suggestion into something more definite. It was coming from somewhere ahead, beyond the nearest dunes, past the edge of what I could see from where I stood. Not threatening—nothing about it triggered the alarm bells that evolution had installed for exactly these situations—but insistent. Beckoning. A question posed in a frequency I could almost but not quite understand.

I raised a hand to shield my eyes from the sun's glare and scanned the horizon. The dunes rolled out before me in waves of orange and gold, rising and falling like a frozen ocean, their crests sharp against the blue sky. Nothing moved. Nothing stood out from the endless repetition of sand and light.

But that sound...

Curiosity ignited in my chest, bright and immediate. Whatever lay ahead was calling me forward, and I found I wanted to answer. The book was solid evidence, yes—proof I could bring home to the doubters—but evidence of what? An empty desert? An unremarkable expanse of sand beneath an unremarkable blue sky?

If Clivilius had secrets, I wanted to find them.

I started walking.

Each step pressed a firm mark into the sand, the rhythm of my movement syncing with the pulse of the distant sound. The hum grew louder as I walked, shifting and evolving, resolving from abstract vibration into something more recognisable. Water. Moving water—not the gentle trickle of a stream but something larger, something with weight and force behind it.

The landscape began to change as I crested one dune and descended into the valley beyond. The sand here was darker, carrying traces of something that might have been moisture, and the air felt fractionally cooler against my skin. I was approaching something. The certainty of it grew with every step.

The sound swelled, gathering strength, transforming from distant suggestion into undeniable presence. It vibrated in my chest now, a roar building at the edges of perception, promising something beyond the barren dunes. Something waiting.

I climbed the final rise with my heart beating faster than the exertion warranted, lungs working, calves burning from the effort of pushing through loose sand. At the top, I stopped.

And the desert unfolded into something I hadn't dared imagine.

It stretched across the landscape like a wound of silver and blue, cutting through the orange monotony in a line so stark it seemed almost violent. The river—because that's what it was, that's what it could only be—extended to the horizon in both directions, wide and gleaming, its surface fracturing sunlight into patterns that shifted and danced and hurt to look at directly.

The contrast stole my breath.

All that sand, all that dusty orange-brown extending for miles in every direction, and then this—this ribbon of impossible blue slicing through the middle of it, alive with movement and sound in a way that made everything else seem suddenly still. The roar I'd been following resolved into layers of rushing water, currents tumbling over each other, the river's voice filling the air with a sound that was both overwhelming and oddly welcoming.

A sharp thrill surged through me, slamming into my chest with the force of revelation. My heart leapt into a wild rhythm, pulse pounding in my ears, adrenaline flooding my system with an urgency that bypassed thought entirely. The book slipped from my grasp—I felt it go but couldn't make myself care—tumbling into the sand behind me as my legs started moving of their own accord.

I ran.

The sand seemed almost complicit in my haste, shifting beneath my feet in ways that felt less like resistance and more like assistance. Each stride carried me down the slope, closer to that impossible shimmer, the roar growing louder with every step. The sound filled my chest now, pressed against my eardrums, vibrated in my teeth. It should have been frightening. Instead, it felt like coming home.

But as the distance closed, something tempered my urgency. The sheer scale of what I was approaching began to sink in, the enormity of it demanding respect. My sprint faltered, slowed, became a walk and then something closer to a pilgrimage. By the time I reached the river's edge, I was already sinking to my knees, overcome not by exhaustion but by something I didn't have a word for.

Awe, maybe. Or reverence. Or the strange humility that comes from standing in the presence of something so much larger than yourself that comparison becomes meaningless.

The river stretched before me, broad and deep and absolutely real. The roar of it enveloped me here, thick and immersive, wrapping around my body like a living thing. I could feel the sound in my bones, in the spaces between my thoughts, filling me up until there was no room left for doubt or fear or the constant background hum of anxiety that had become my baseline state.

I shivered—not from cold, not yet, but from something deeper. A current running through me that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with recognition. This wasn't just discovery. This wasn't just finding water in a desert.

This was finding something I hadn't known I was looking for.

Crouching low at the river's edge, I pressed my palms against the sun-warmed rock that bordered the water. An almost sacred hush settled over me despite the river's constant voice—or maybe because of it, the sound so complete it became its own kind of silence. With a reverence that felt instinctive rather than chosen, I extended my hand toward the surface.

The instant my fingertips met the water, cold jolted through me like electricity.

I gasped—couldn't help it—the shock of it stealing the air from my lungs. It was freezing. Properly, genuinely cold in a way that defied the sun beating down from overhead, the kind of cold that spoke of deep places and underground sources and water that had never known warmth. The chill bit into my skin with an intensity that bordered on pain.

But beneath the shock was something else. A rush of vitality that followed the cold like its shadow, surging up my arm and spreading through my chest, waking nerves I hadn't realised had been sleeping. I felt more present suddenly, more alive, as though the river's touch had sharpened the boundaries of my body and reminded every cell what it meant to exist.

I let my hand linger in the current, feeling it tug at my fingers with gentle insistence. The water was so clear I could see straight to the bottom—or what appeared to be the bottom, though I suspected the clarity was deceptive, the depth greater than it looked. Stones carpeted the riverbed in colours I hadn't expected: ochres and deep greens, greys shot through with white veins, here and there a flash of something that might have been purple or might have been a trick of the light.

The beauty of it was almost too much. Each stone seemed polished to a gleam, their surfaces catching and throwing back the sunlight in scattered fragments that danced across the water's surface. It was like looking into a kaleidoscope, or a jewellery box, or some private gallery where nature had been arranging its most beautiful work for millennia without any expectation of audience.

The temptation that had been building since I first saw the shimmer on the horizon became suddenly unbearable.

I was still wearing the shorts I'd thrown on before breakfast—shorts that had seemed perfectly adequate for a morning at home and now felt like permission. The sun pressed against my bare shoulders and back, its warmth urging me forward with an insistence that was impossible to ignore. The contrast between the heat above and the cold invitation below created a tension in my body that demanded resolution.

I straightened up from my crouch, made a decision without consciously making it, and stepped into the river.

The first splash was bright and joyous, droplets leaping skyward like a celebration. The cold hit my ankles and calves with a shock that made me catch my breath, then rose past my knees as I waded deeper, the riverbed solid beneath my feet. My shorts soaked through and clung to my thighs, the fabric suddenly heavy, suddenly present in a way that made me acutely aware of my own body.

Waist-deep now, the current wrapped around me with an intimacy that was almost startling. It wasn't forceful—not here, at least, away from the churning centre—but it was persistent, pressing against my hips and stomach with a constant gentle pressure that seemed to be asking something of me. Above the waterline, the breeze skimmed across my chest and shoulders, its cool touch raising the fine hairs on my skin, making me hyperaware of every inch it grazed.

The sensation was overwhelming. Hot above, cold below, my body caught between opposing forces that somehow complemented rather than conflicted with each other. I stood there, breathing, feeling, letting the experience flood in without trying to filter or analyse it.

And then something else stirred. Something deeper than physical sensation, though it expressed itself through the body.

The current against my legs. The fabric clinging to my skin. The breeze tracing lines across my chest. All of it combined into an awareness that was... not quite arousal, not exactly, but somewhere in that territory. A heightening. A sharpening. A reminder that I existed in a body, that the body was capable of feeling things I'd been too busy or too stressed or too caught up in the machinery of daily survival to notice.

The river was stripping something away from me. Layers I'd built up over years without realising, defences and numbness and the thousand small ways I'd learned to disconnect from my own physical existence. Here, in this impossible place, there was nowhere to hide from sensation. The cold and the warmth and the pressure and the movement all demanded attention, and in demanding attention, they demanded presence.

I filled my lungs with air—that clean, sweet air that tasted like nothing I'd ever breathed—and bent my knees.

The river closed over my head with a sound like the world being switched off.

Silence. Total, complete, enveloping silence broken only by the muffled rush of current and the thunder of my own heartbeat. The cold hit me everywhere at once, total immersion, no part of my body exempt from its embrace. It was shocking and exhilarating and slightly terrifying, all in the same instant.

But the terror faded quickly. The exhilaration remained.

The sun's warmth pressed down from above, filtering through the water in shafts of gold that played across the riverbed. The cold rose from below and all around, a living presence that wrapped around my limbs and chest and face with an intimacy that felt almost personal. The two forces met at my skin, hot and cold warring and merging, creating a sensation so intense it short-circuited thought and left only raw experience.

Joy bloomed in my chest—pure, uncomplicated joy of the kind I hadn't felt since childhood. It bubbled up from somewhere I'd forgotten existed, and for a moment I could have laughed underwater, could have opened my mouth and let out whatever sound wanted to come regardless of consequences.

But beneath the joy, woven through it, something else was building. Something that had more to do with the body than the mind. The water against my skin wasn't just cold anymore—it was sensation, every nerve ending firing with an intensity that bordered on overwhelming. I was aware of myself in a way I hadn't been for years, aware of every inch of skin, every place where water met flesh and created friction.

It wasn't invasive. Wasn't shameful. It was simply truth, laid bare by the river's touch—an amplification of feelings I'd been carrying without acknowledging them. Longing for connection. Hunger for presence. The deep animal need to feel and be felt.

The water peeled back layers I hadn't known I'd built, stripping me down to something raw and essential. Here, submerged in a river that shouldn't exist in a world that shouldn't be real, I was more myself than I'd been in longer than I could remember.

Below me, the riverbed spread out like a mosaic crafted over millennia. Stones in every shape and colour, their surfaces polished to glass by centuries of current, arranged in patterns that seemed almost intentional. My hand reached down without conscious direction, fingers brushing against a large stone, its surface cool and impossibly smooth.

The contact grounded me. Reminded me that this wasn't dream or hallucination but solid, tangible reality. This stone had been here long before I arrived and would be here long after I left. Whatever was happening to me, whatever layers the river was stripping away, it was happening in a real place to a real body.

Then my lungs began to burn.

I pushed off from the bottom, arms sweeping, body arcing upward through the cold toward the dancing light above. The surface broke around me in a spray of droplets, and air flooded into my lungs with a rush that felt almost violent—too much sensation after the muffled quiet below.

I shook my head without thinking, an instinctive motion that sent water flying in all directions. The droplets caught the sunlight as they flew, transformed momentarily into diamonds, into sparks, into tiny prisms throwing rainbow fragments across the air before they fell back to the river and disappeared. The gesture was so familiar it made me laugh—a brief, surprised sound at the memory of Duke and Henri doing exactly this after baths, their small bodies shaking with the same unconscious frivolity.

My hair plastered against my skull, water streaming down my face, I tipped my head back and looked up at the sky. That impossible blue, arching overhead without boundary or interruption. The sun burning down with its relentless warmth, already beginning to dry the droplets on my upturned face.

I was suspended between worlds. Not just Earth and Clivilius, but water and air, cold and warmth, the self I'd been and whatever self I was becoming. The river tugged at my legs with its persistent current, and the sky stretched overhead with its infinite promise, and I floated between them, belonging to neither entirely.

Every breath felt charged with something. Every bead of water sliding down my body carried meaning I couldn't quite articulate. The desire I'd felt underwater hadn't faded—it had transformed, spreading from something specifically physical into something larger, a general hunger for experience, for sensation, for life lived at full intensity rather than filtered through the grey gauze of routine and responsibility.

The river wasn't just water. It was a mirror, showing me both who I was and who I might yet become. And in its embrace, I was no longer just surviving, no longer just going through the motions of a life that had somewhere along the way stopped feeling like mine.

I was awakening.

But awakening to what? The question hovered at the edge of my awareness, unanswerable but insistent. Whatever this was, whatever Clivilius was offering, it came with weight. With responsibility. The river could strip me raw, could burn away the layers of numbness and disconnection, but what I did with that rawness was up to me.

For a while longer I floated, letting the current carry me gently downstream, watching the sky drift past overhead. The cold had become almost comfortable now, my body adjusting, finding equilibrium with the water's temperature. I could have stayed here for hours. Could have let the river hold me until the sun moved across the sky and the shadows lengthened and time stopped meaning anything at all.

But reality, with its merciless persistence, wouldn't let me forget.

Paul's flight would be landing soon. Jamie was already on the road to the airport, carrying his frustration and his questions toward a brother-in-law he didn't particularly want to see. Back in Berriedale, in that brick house with its fresh renovation smells and its growing silences, my absence would eventually be noticed. The ordinary world was still turning, regardless of what extraordinary things were happening here.

With reluctant strokes, I swam back toward the bank. Each movement felt like a small betrayal, like pulling away from something that had just begun to offer what I'd been craving without knowing it. The water released me by degrees—waist, thighs, knees, ankles—the cold retreating as the air claimed more and more of my body.

I stood in the shallows for a moment, letting the transition settle. The breeze that had felt pleasant before now carried a chill against my wet skin, and I shivered with something that was half cold and half loss. The river continued its patient rush behind me, indifferent to my departure, and I had the strange thought that it would go on exactly like this for centuries after I was gone. Still flowing. Still beautiful. Still offering its secrets to anyone willing to wade into its depths.

The ochre dust was warm beneath my feet as I stepped onto dry land, grains clinging eagerly to my damp skin. They coated my soles and ankles, worked their way between my toes, soft and sun-soaked and oddly comforting. The ground was trying to claim me, I thought. Clivilius was trying to keep me here.

"I'll be back soon," I said to the water, the air, the empty desert. My voice sounded strange out here—too small, too human, absorbed by the vast silence almost before the words had finished forming. But I meant it. The promise wasn't idle. Whatever happened next, whatever waited for me back in the ordinary world, I would return to this river. I would come back to this place that had shown me what it felt like to be fully, terrifyingly alive.

My hand skimmed across the water's surface one final time, fingers flicking droplets into the sunlight. They arced through the air, brilliant points of light suspended for a heartbeat before falling home. The gesture felt like a farewell and a promise wrapped into one.

I turned away.

The walk back felt longer than the run toward the river had been. My legs were heavy now, pleasantly tired, and my shorts dripped a trail of water onto the sand that evaporated almost as fast as it fell. The sun was already doing its work, drying me by degrees, reclaiming the moisture the river had given me. By the time I reached the spot where I'd dropped the book, I was merely damp rather than soaking, the fabric clinging less insistently to my skin.

I bent to retrieve it, brushing off a fresh layer of dust, checking the cover and spine for damage. Still intact. Still unchanged. A relic of Earth that had witnessed my swim and remained exactly what it had always been.

The trek back toward the portal gave me time to think. Each footfall pressed into the dust with a soft hiss, the rhythm almost meditative, and my mind wandered ahead to what was coming. Paul landing in Hobart, full of questions about the "family crisis" I'd invented to get him here. Jamie driving home with his brother-in-law, trying to make conversation through the wall of resentment I'd built with that breakfast argument.

And then—what? How was I supposed to bridge the gap between their reality and mine? How could I possibly explain standing in front of them with dust on my skin and water still drying in my hair and say, there's a portal in my study that leads to another dimension, and I've been swimming in a river that exists in a place none of our maps have ever heard of?

The portal's location was easy enough to find. But as I approached, something else caught my attention. Something that hadn't been there before, or that I'd failed to notice in my rush toward the river.

It rose from the desert floor perhaps twenty metres to the left of the portal, and at first I thought I was looking at nothing at all. Just empty air with an unusual quality to it, a faint shimmer that might have been heat haze if the pattern had been less regular. But as I drew closer, the shape resolved into something more definite.

A screen. A wall. A vast transparent surface rising from the sand with impossible regularity.

I stopped, staring.

Its edges were difficult to make out, bleeding into the air at their boundaries, but the centre was unmistakable once you knew where to look. Light caught on its surface in ways that betrayed its presence—faint rainbow glints that flickered and vanished, like oil on water or the edge of a soap bubble caught in sunlight.

Through it, I could see the far dunes continuing their endless roll toward the horizon, unchanged and uninterrupted. The screen didn't block the view; it merely added a layer to it, a lens through which the landscape appeared both exactly the same and subtly different.

I approached slowly, feet dragging in the sand, heart beginning to beat faster without quite understanding why.

When I was close enough to reach out and touch it, the surface flickered.

My study appeared.

I blinked, stumbled back a step, certain I'd imagined it. But no—there it was, clear as a photograph, projected or displayed or somehow manifested across the transparent expanse. The ordinary, unremarkable domestic reality of a room I'd stood in a thousand times.

Seeing it here, framed against the desert's vastness, was so disorienting that my brain seemed to stutter. The wrongness of it, the jarring collision of the familiar and the impossible, created a kind of cognitive vertigo that made me grip the book tighter against my chest.

And then came the voice.

Select your destination, Luke Smith.

It wasn't sound. The words didn't enter through my ears the way normal speech did, didn't carry the physical properties of vibration through air. They arrived somewhere deeper, settling into my awareness with a weight that suggested they had always been there waiting to be noticed.

And then, before I could process what was happening, the world ignited.

Colours erupted from the centre of the displayed wall—brilliant, searing, cascading outward in ribbons of light that defied the spectrum I thought I knew. Crimson and violet and gold, indigo and emerald and shades I couldn't name, all of them moving with a vitality that made them seem almost alive. They raced across the screen in torrents, spiralling and interweaving, painting the transparent surface with a display that was both beautiful and terrifying in its intensity.

I stood transfixed, my eyes unable to look away from the electric storm unfolding before me. This wasn't just a window. It wasn't just a display. It was something more—a threshold, a gateway, a manifestation of possibility itself made visible and tangible and undeniably present.

I stepped forward into the light.

The transition was gentle. No violent wrench, no shuddering passage through the membrane between worlds. Just the simple fact of being somewhere else, as though I'd stepped through an ordinary doorway rather than an impossible threshold. The familiar smell of paper and wood polish replaced the dry sweetness of desert air. The familiar weight of walls and ceiling replaced the infinite sky.

Behind me, the colours folded inward and vanished. The blank wall returned, ordinary plaster and paint, bearing no trace of what had just happened. The speed of the transition startled me—the unhesitating obedience with which the portal had opened and closed at my approach, as though my very thoughts had been woven into its mechanism.

I stood in my study, dripping the last traces of river water onto the carpet, and let the reality of my return settle around me.

Everything was exactly as I'd left it. The desk with its clutter of half-finished projects. The shelves lined with their familiar spines. The gap where one book was missing. The ordinary domestic reality of a room I'd inhabited for years, unchanged by my absence, indifferent to the transformation I'd just undergone.

But I had changed. I could feel it in my bones, in the new weight of certainty that had settled into my chest. The room itself seemed different somehow—not visually, nothing I could point to, but in the way it felt. As though the walls knew something they hadn't known before. As though the air carried traces of impossible colours and desert dust and the cold kiss of a river that existed in another world.

Clivilius was real. The river was real. The voice that had known my name and offered me choice was real.

And I—standing in my study with wet hair and damp clothes and sand still caught between my toes—was no longer the same person who had pressed that button for the first time yesterday afternoon.